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Open Books: Events
October 15, 2009 07:30 PM
KATE GREENSTREET & LINDA RUSSO
Kate Greenstreet is a courageous writer. The poems in The Last 4 Things ($19 Ahsahta), a book + DVD, seem to make existential dilemma manifest. There is presence -- "One begins with so little -- collecting, sweeping. / Or seeing it, just seeing. // Months of dust” -- and a feel throughout of story, but there is no following a story. She creates a Beckett sort of other-worldly worldliness with her very clean, very certain writing. In her words, "making art, too, / is a kind of disappearing. A bucket with holes, on purpose."
The work in Mirth ($16 Chax), Linda Russo's latest, is composed of snappily taut lines lashing a sensitive self to its cultural bombardment. At times she’s a post-modern Dorothy Parker -- "Carbomb in Carachi -- that’s catchy" -- presenting the comic as the compulsive and inadequate antidote to the tragic. And her poetry is at all times cracklingly musical -- for a bit of aural delight say this aloud: "an odor ineffably caught in a weave, that is your writing."
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